‘I’ve had a lot of interest,’ Rav said, and I feigned enthusiasm as he reported several booked appointments and more still to be confirmed.
‘They all know not to talk to other agents, right?’ My latest fear: a viewer who had seen the Reeces’ house would discuss this lower asking price, use it to negotiate with them. Sophie Reece would come around to discuss the situation with Fi. ‘I think you must have the wrong end of the stick,’ Fi would say, her brow creasing in that bemused way I used to find so cute. She hated discord between neighbours, went out of her way to protect the status quo. ‘Trust me, I think I’d know,’ she’d say, and Sophie would agree, there must have been a misunderstanding.
More usefully, the Reeces had a second home in France and went there every school holiday without fail. Unless I was very unlucky, they were away from the street exactly when I needed them to be.
‘Your wife’s not going to be here today?’ Rav said.
‘No, she’s away with the kids for a long weekend. Women and children only.’ The idea of that group of women spending three days drinking and putting the world to rights was an unsettling one – then again, it was hardly the most unsettling thing on my mind. If they had any notion of what I was doing now, a marital atrocity so heinous it made adultery seem like charity . . .
‘You drew the short straw then, eh?’ Rav’s assistant said. She was busy with a spectacular arrangement of lilies for the hall table, their green stems were forked like antlers, pink mouths ready to seduce all who entered.
*
As Rav had promised, there were several interested parties, too many to recall individually but not enough to cause congestion. I skulked in the shadows, concentrating on not smoking, throwing ghostly smiles to anyone who approached.
‘You have a gorgeous house,’ they said, one after another. ‘Are you definitely in the catchment for Alder Rise Primary?’
‘Yes, and the Two Brewers,’ I said, but the joke fell flat, possibly because I looked so convincingly like a man in need of rehab.
Finally, as the last candidates of the day toured, I allowed myself a cigarette at the bottom of the garden, sitting on the edge of the playhouse deck. The ground was hardening with the first cold, curling golden leaves waiting to be kicked and crunched by the kids. It had been soft underfoot that night in July when my luck had finally expired. Nature had issued no helpful warning when Fi crept down the garden path towards us.
Oh Fi. No woman deserved less what she had coming.
‘That went very well,’ Rav said, when the doors were closed. ‘I’m confident we’ll have requests for second viewings after the weekend, if not our first offers.’
I fetched us beers from the fridge; playing the game was easier with alcohol – even this game. ‘How can they even afford this sort of price?’ I asked. ‘They can’t all have big banking jobs.’
‘They’re selling a flat or a cottage in Battersea or Clapham or Brixton. Maybe two. But you’re looking for a purchaser who isn’t selling as well, I know.’
‘Yes, we’d prefer not to be caught in a chain. We need this done quickly.’
‘That will be our priority. There’s often an inheritance floating around, so let’s see if we can’t find one of those.’
Which made me think of Fi – again – and her determination that the house should be inherited by Leo and Harry, and for a moment the fact of my standing here with the aim of selling their home from under them struck me as scientifically impossible, utterly severed from reality. Some karmic interconnectedness would stop this from proceeding: no one would make an offer, however low the price, and then I’d have done Mike’s bidding without inflicting any real damage. He and Wendy would slink from my life and into some other sucker’s.
Yeah right.
In the end, it was the eerie familiarity of the viewers that I most disliked; the wife radiating social ambition, the husband more cautious or at least better skilled at hiding his aspirations. He prided himself on his negotiator’s poker face, perhaps, just as I had all those moons ago. ‘I’ll beat them down,’ I’d told Fi of our divorcing teachers, and soon we were celebrating with champagne, thinking ourselves quite the conquering heroes.
No, I would have preferred it to be a millionaire’s daughter from Beijing or a lottery winner from Burnley. Not Fi and me in a previous life.
32
‘Fi’s Story’ > 01:55:30
Saturday night’s Halloween party was traditionally the crowning glory of the trip. Custom decreed there be a large bowl of tinned lychees and another of spaghetti in tomato sauce, the blindfolded children taking it in turns to plunge their hands into the ‘eyeballs’ and ‘brains’ respectively. Then, vision restored and faces painted, they danced and screamed under spiders’ webs of fairy lights, ate cake with lurid green icing (slime) and drank cherry juice (vampire’s blood) through curly straws.
It was the kids who were in costume, but when I looked in the mirror at the end of the evening I saw a transformation in myself too. In contravention of the laws of Halloween, I looked less ghoulish, more human. I’ve survived this, I thought. I feel good.
Is it because adultery is not the worst crime in the world, not by a long shot? People are murdering each other out there, abusing the vulnerable and stealing from the elderly; there are bombed cities and drowned refugees. Why not forgive Bram, then – forgive him a second time?
Because there’d be a third and a fourth and a fifth, that was why not. I extinguished the bathroom light and, with it, the thought.
‘Oh, Ali, it’s so beautiful here,’ Merle was saying, when I returned downstairs. Kirsty was supervising bedtime, the kids in rows of blow-up beds under the eaves. Bingo, Kirsty’s spaniel, and Alison’s Lab Rocky had passed out on the rug in the sitting room, no one fully sure what they might have ingested during the festivities.
‘We all helped make it nice,’ Alison said, surveying the debris over the top of her Prosecco glass.
‘Not the party stuff, the whole house. I wish I had your eye.’
Merle had never been a house-proud type; not like Alison with her on-trend paint finishes and dawn raids on New Covent Garden Market for her flowers. I remember seeing Merle once trimming her fingernails with kitchen scissors, brushing the cuttings onto the floor. She’d exit the kitchen with handfuls of G & Ts and turn off the light switch with her nose. She was spontaneous, playful, with a joie de vivre I’d always envied.
Still do.
As she took a deep gulp of wine, as if quenching thirst with a soft drink, I noticed the liquid in her flute was more effervescent than ours, bubbles leaping from the surface. ‘You’re not drinking, Merle?’
She pulled a face: the game was up. I sensed that she might have denied it had it been one of the others who’d asked. ‘Sparkling elderflower,’ she confessed.
‘Just this glass or the whole time?’
She shrugged.
‘You snake,’ Alison gasped. ‘I can’t believe you’ve infiltrated our nest. What’s going on?’
‘Nothing exciting,’ Merle said, ‘I’ve just been going sober in October.’
‘Why? The charity thing?’
‘Not exactly. Maybe, I just liked the rhyme?’
Alison snorted. This was too silly for Merle and she knew we knew that.
‘I’m never going sober,’ I said. I had an ancient instinct to protect her from further interrogation. ‘And I don’t care if Shakespeare said it in iambic pentameter . . .’
‘Oh, but you’re in a new relationship,’ Alison said. ‘That’s always a time of intoxication – in all senses of the word.’
I chuckled. ‘In my experience, it’s the old relationships that drive us to drink.’
Alison’s eye returned to Merle, who gazed past her to the clotted black world beyond the window.
‘Well, at least this is the last day of the month,’ Alison said, sighing.